me ? i'm one of a kind..

I’ll never forget a time when a tech podcast which I actually respect tried to give ai its due and blue sky about actual use cases for it. And what they came up with as a best case real world application for ai in the legal field was… what LexisNexis could already do, roughly ten years ago. When I say “I don’t think we need LLMs for almost literally anything” I am not saying that I think that none of the uses for ai that people are dreaming up have any utility; I’m saying that almost all of the uses which are worthwhile already exist without ai, and remaking them with ai is costly, silly, and tends to if anything degrade their existing functionality. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here! API calls and databases and extensive backend tagging and deterministic programming are awesome, powerful tools! And they already exist! You do not need the magic feather, Dumbo, I promise!!!

Lea Gardner, Nights Lately, 2025, Oil on cradled wood panel

Leah Gardner